Category Food

Are all fats bad?

Did you know that a balanced diet must include fat? Why? Read on to find out.

Not all fats are unhealthy. A balanced diet must include fat as it is a source of energy and helps our body to absorb other nutrients.

Healthy fats like monounsaturated fats, polyunsaturated fats and omega-3 fatty acids help to lower cholesterol. The richest sources of unsaturated fats are cooking oils like olive, soybean and peanut oils, nuts and tofu.

Omega-3 fatty acids are found in oily fish, nuts, seeds and leafy green vegetables. They are essential nutrients not produced by our body, but vital for normal growth in young children. Bad fats like saturated fats raise our cholesterol levels, clog our arteries and increase our risk of heart disease in addition to making us obese. We get saturated fats from animal products: red meat and whole-milk dairy products like cheese, ice cream and butter. However, they are also an important source of vitamins and minerals. Hence, we should limit, not eliminate our consumption of saturated fats.

Trans fats, also known as hydrogenated fats, are found in processed foods, like French fries and cookies. They raise bad cholesterol and lower good cholesterol. Next time you buy snacks, check for the term partially-hydrogenated oil in the list of ingredients – those are the items you must avoid.

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WHAT IS SO SPECIAL ABOUT BAKEYS COMPANY IN HYDERABAD?

Bakeys is a Hyderabad-based edible cutlery company founded by Narayana Peesapaty. He wanted to use a raw material that wouldn’t consume too much water during manufacture. Hence, he opted to make his brand of single-use cutlery from a mix of sorghum (jowar), rice and wheat flours. Sorghum grows well in semi-arid areas and doesn’t become soggy quickly when dipped in liquids.

At a time when the world over, people are trying to reduce plastic waste, several innovations have emerged over the years, to aid the cause. A leap in this direction are handy, delectable, consumable cutlery. Yes, you heard right. It is exactly what it sounds like cutlery that you can chomp down, along with the food that comes in it Disposable plastic cutlery, straws, cups, and containers generate large amounts of plastic waste. Hence, researchers have been coming out with new innovations in containers used to hold and package food to try and reduce plastic waste. The container holding the food is itself good enough to eat, and the packaging is either edible or compostable

The flour is kneaded with hot water, shaped and baked hard without using any artificial additive or preservative. Since it is dehydrated, it can last for up to two years if stored in an air-tight container in a cool dry, insect-free place. It should not be wiped, washed or reused.

The spoons, that taste like a dry cracker, come in varied flavours including sugar, ginger-cinnamon, cumin, mint-ginger and carrot-beetroot. The portion dipped in hot food softens, absorbing the dish’s flavours.

Uneaten spoons can be disposed in mud or put in a potted plant, because, unlike com-based biodegradable plastic they don’t need special composting to break down.

The company has been making such spoons since 2010 in a facility which employs only women. Successful crowdfunding campaigns on Kickstarter and Ketto enabled it to expand, and now, they are sold globally.

Bite size perfection

In 2012, David Edwards, the founder of WikiFoods, launched WikiCells, an edible packaging for foods and liquids.

The WikiCell has two layers. The outer biodegradable layer, which can be peeled off and thrown away, much like a fruit peel, is made of tapioca or sugarcane bagasse, the dry pulpy residue left after sugar has been extracted. It is gelatinous and soft, like a translucent cell. The inner layer is an edible shell made of a hardened composite such as chocolate or isomalt, a sugar substitute.

Incredible Foods, co-founded by Edwards, manufactures and markets WikiCells in the U.S. as Perfectly Free bites in non-dairy ice-cream form and as frozen fruit bites.

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DO MUSHROOMS HAVE A VOCABULARY?

A study reveals that mushrooms (the above-ground fruit of fungi) are great communicators. When the hyphae (long, thread-like structures that form the mycelium or root network) of a wood-digesting fungi came into contact with wood, they lit up with spikes of electrical signals that reached out to the hyphae of other fungi, suggesting that fungi may use electrical transmissions to share information about food or injury.

To measure spikes in signal activity, tiny electrodes were connected to the hyphae of four fungi species ghost, caterpillar, split gill and enoki. Spikes varied in duration and length, with some lasting up to 21 hours. The clusters of electrical spikes resembled a human vocabulary of up to 50 ‘words’. However, only 15 to 20 fungal words are used frequently. The average length of each word was 5.97 ‘letters’; the English language averages 4.8 letters per word. Split-gill mushrooms produced the most diverse ‘sentences’.

While the research shows that fungi produce patterns of electric signals, there’s no way to tell what they are talking about. Comparing the electrical impulses to human speech is notable, but some researchers say that it requires more research.

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What is the history of French Toast?

Was the French toast invented in France? O one is sure. One story is that, during medieval times, state bread was reused by dipping it in batter and toasting it. But we do not know if the French cooks were the first to dip and fry bread. A similar dish, suppe borate, was popular in England during the middle Ages. There is also the story of Joseph French, an innkeeper in Albany. New York. In 1724, he advertised the fried toast as “French Toast.” Grammatically, he should have said, “French Toast.” But he had not learnt to use apostrophes. The dish is called pain perdu in French, meaning “lost bread” because it is recycled or “lost” bread. What is really “lost” is the origin of this popular breakfast dish.

 

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What is the history of Pie?

Did you know that the popular circle-shaped food item that can be sweet or savory was once spelt “pye”? This is a highly respected backed dish, whose history can be traced all the way back to ancient Greece and Rome. Today, the pastry-based pie is generally sweet, but it was once mostly made with a salty taste. There was a reason for this. This crisp crust of the pie, when baked, helped to preserve the meat the pie was filled with.

Have you tasted the apple pie?

Americans claim it is their “own” dish. “There are few things as American as apple pie.” They say. A, but the original apple pie recipes came from England. The original pies were made with unsweetened apples and were put in a cover that had to be thrown away. Yet the apple pie became popular. The first reference to this baked desert appeared in 1589, in the poem Menaphon by poet E. Greece: “They breath is like the steeme of apple pies.”

 

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What is the history of Waffles?

Now that the waffle-maker is available in stores, you can make crisp and “hole-y” waffles at home! This breakfast food item made with a beautiful pattern has an interesting back story. Ancient Greeks used a tool that resembled today’s waffle iron to make cakes, and the earliest European settles in Greece brought this to the New Americas. Waffles also arrived in the U.S. with the Pilgrims (check out who they are). These famous travelers had tasted this breakfast filler in Holland en route to Massachusetts. Thomas Jefferson, the former U.S. President reportedly brought a waffle iron home from France around 1789. Well, he served waffles to his guests and sparked a fad for waffle parties in the U.S. In the 1930s, a California family smartly combined instant waffle mix and electricity (for the waffle iron) to mass-produce waffles.

 

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